An increasing number of applications today make use of digital video for various purposes including, for example, remote business meetings via video conferencing, high definition video entertainment, video advertisements, and sharing of user-generated videos. As technology is evolving, people have higher expectations for video quality and expect high resolution video with smooth playback at a high frame rate.
There can be many factors to consider when selecting a video coder for encoding, storing and transmitting digital video. Some applications may require excellent video quality where others may need to comply with various constraints including, for example, bandwidth or storage requirements. To permit higher quality transmission of video while limiting bandwidth consumption, a number of video compression schemes are noted including proprietary formats such as VPx (promulgated by On2 Technologies, Inc. of Clifton Park, N.Y.), H.264 standard promulgated by ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), including present and future versions thereof. H.264 is also known as MPEG-4 Part 10 or MPEG-4 AVC (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10).
There are many types of video encoding schemes that allow video data to be compressed and recovered. The H.264 standard, for example, offers more efficient methods of video coding by incorporating entropy coding methods such as Context-based Adaptive Variable Length Coding (CAVLC) and Context-based Adaptive Binary Arithmetic Coding (CABAC). For video data that is encoded using CAVLC, some modern decompression systems have adopted the use of a multi-core processor or multiprocessors to increase overall video decoding speed.